Spotlight

Hyde Park on the East River

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, on New York’s Roosevelt Island, was the last design of the late architect Louis I. Kahn.

A 1933 bronze bust of F.D.R. by Jo Davidson stands at the entrance to the main plaza of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park.

Louis I. Kahn’s design incorporates 28 columns of granite to form the 3,600-square-foot plaza of the park, which overlooks the East River.

The Four Freedoms, as outlined by Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union speech, are engraved on the south side of the sculpture niche.

Looking south from the four-acre park, the visitor has a clear view of the United Nations building.

To the north of the park, situated on Roosevelt Island, is the Queensboro Bridge, which spans the East River.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, on New York’s Roosevelt Island, was the last design of the late architect Louis I. Kahn.

A 1933 bronze bust of F.D.R. by Jo Davidson stands at the entrance to the main plaza of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park.

Louis I. Kahn’s design incorporates 28 columns of granite to form the 3,600-square-foot plaza of the park, which overlooks the East River.

The Four Freedoms, as outlined by Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union speech, are engraved on the south side of the sculpture niche.

Looking south from the four-acre park, the visitor has a clear view of the United Nations building.

To the north of the park, situated on Roosevelt Island, is the Queensboro Bridge, which spans the East River.

When the great architect Louis I. Kahn died at 73, in 1974, he had just finished the design for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, planned for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, in New York’s East River. It was Kahn’s first design for New York—that is, until it was sidelined in 1975, when the city approached bankruptcy. The project was in limbo for nearly 30 years, while Kahn’s reputation as one of the most sublime practitioners of modernism (the Kimball Art Museum, in Fort Worth; the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California) continued to grow. In 2005, William J. vanden Heuvel, a former U.N. ambassador and a founder of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, launched the effort to get the four-acre park built to Kahn’s specifications, gathering more than $50 million in private and public funds. The park, renamed Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, opens to the public on October 24. The memorial is a procession of elegant open-air spaces, culminating in a 3,600-square-foot plaza surrounded by 28 blocks of North Carolina granite, each weighing 36 tons. At the entrance to the plaza is a 1933 bronze bust of F.D.R. by Jo Davidson. The Four Freedoms, outlined by Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union speech, are engraved on the south side of the sculpture niche. In contrast with the hard granite forms, Kahn placed five copper-beech trees at the memorial’s entrance and 120 little-leaf lindens in allées leading up to the monument. According to Kahn’s son, Nathaniel Kahn (whose mother, Harriet Pattison, was Kahn’s mistress and collaborator on the landscape design of the park), “Roosevelt was a great hero of my father’s, and it adds to the poignancy of it, being the last thing he designed.”